Sun goes to court over Sir Fred Goodwin gagging order

Paper argues ‘sunlight should be shed’ on former RBS chief’s conduct before bailout of bank The Sun has applied to partially lift the gagging order obtained by former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, arguing that “sunlight should be shed” on the crisis that left the bank majority-owned by UK taxpayers. Goodwin was granted a wide-ranging privacy injunction earlier this year preventing reporting of the details of his alleged extra-marital affair with a female colleague. Lawyers acting for News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Sun, appealed to the high court in London on Wednesday to relax the injunction so as to allow reporting of the details of the RBS job held by the woman involved, as well as the duration of the alleged affair. Mr Justice Tugendhat reserved judgment. Richard Spearman QC, acting on behalf of News Group, told the court the public has a right to know “what – if any – part this affair may or may not have played in the collapse of the bank” and “leading to [the public] having to put up money for this bank”. He added: “It is plainly a matter of real genuine public interest. Sunlight should be shed on dark corners of this case.” Spearman said that the paper had “no wish” to publish “salacious or intimate sexual details” about the alleged affair, but just “work-related details”. He added that the paper was not necessarily intending to name the woman involved. However, Hugh Tomlinson QC, acting for Goodwin and the woman involved, argued that if the injunction was partially lifted for a second time, the woman would be “subject to large numbers of journalists camped outside her house” and would suffer “very serious levels of intrusion into her life”. The gagging order was partially lifted by Tugendhat last month , with the injunction varied to allow publication of Goodwin’s name, but not details of the alleged relationship and the name of the woman said to be involved. “There is no cogent reason of any kind why the identification of this woman would advance any public interest debate,” he said. “It is not good enough to say that there are all kind of questions to be asked [about RBS], therefore we should be able to invade the woman’s private life. [The Sun] doesn’t need to identify this person to ask these questions.” The government owns 83% of RBS after being forced to bail out the bank when its share price slumped following losses incurred in the 2007-08 financial crash. •

Posted by on June 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.